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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Not a Doomer, a Peakster

Yes, that's us. The Earth, photographed from a distance of 4 billion miles by Voyager, is the dot in the centre to the right. Do we look like masters of the universe?

Wikipedia will tell
you that peak oil is the theoretical point at which half of the
world's oil reserves have been extracted. This is literally true, but
it's not the whole story. Many people in the peak oil blogosphere
spend inordinate amounts of time and mental energy trying to figure
out how much oil or gas is left in various fields around the world
and how much time we have left to do something (i.e. how much time we
have left to do nothing).

To me, this is not what
peak oil is about. I know, for example, that one day (God forbid) I
am going to die. I don't spend much time trying to predict the exact
date of my death, instead I just get on with living in the time
allotted to me. My demise is not so much a problem that can be dealt with, but a predicament that I must live with. In the same way it seems to me that to focus so much on how much
recoverable fossil fuel there is in the ground seems to be missing
the point.

But I haven't always
thought like this.

For me, the penny
dropped in around 2009 when I read Thomas Homer Dixon's The Upside of Down. Here, for the first time, was someone talking about the
ecological crises we face from an entirely different angle. Instead
of evil corporations and politicians Homer Dixon took a broader view,
looking at the history of empires, using Rome as an example of how
civilizations begin to feed off themselves and eventually collapse.
It occurred to me for the first time that I might be part of a
civilization in decline.

Amazon.com, the next time I
logged on, kindly said that if I liked Thomas Homer Dixon, I'd
probably like John Michael Greer too. I put The Long Descent
in my electronic basket and, a few days later, the book that would
change my life forever arrived in my postbox. I eagerly read the
jacket – at the top it read 'A harrowing but ultimately hopeful
vision of the aftermath of the age of oil'. I read it cover to cover
in a day.

Whoa! The book was a
banquet for the mind – a true epiphany The concept of catabolic
collapse was probably the most radical idea I had ever heard of. Of
course, I had heard the term peak oil bandied around for years but it
had always remained at the abstract level. Reading The Long
Descent I suddenly found myself staring into a chasm, and it was
far more frightening than any environmental apocalypse scenario I had
considered before. Just who was this John Michael Greer and what gave
him the right to such genius? I Googled him, expecting to uncover a
picture of a mild-mannered but crumpled-looking academic with a neat
centre parting standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation.
Instead I was presented with a man with a long beard and wearing
white robes standing in a megalithic stone circle like some real-life Merlin.

I was stunned. I found
out that he was an American archdruid and had written books on
spirituality, magic and science fiction. He did not seem to be
possessed of a normal mind, so sharp and penetrating were his
insights. All of the other non-fiction authors I had read to date
paled by comparison.

But I was hungry for
more, and sent off for more books. Richard Heinberg was next with The Party's Over and Peak Everything. Then came others.
Michael C. Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, James Howard Kunstler, Sharon Astyck
– I devoured them all.

And every book I read
seemed to spread out tentacles and demand that I read the works of
other great minds. E.F. Schumacher, whose book Small is Beautiful
was one of the core texts here (as is his Guide For The
Perplexed), and eventually I got onto William R. Catton's
Overshoot – the first book to seriously address human
ecology back in the 1980s.

All of these writers
addressed one simple fact – the peaking of world oil supplies,
happening right about now. But what they went into in ever greater
detail is the consequences of that peaking. Whole new worlds opened
up before me. I found myself reading and thinking about this stuff
practically every waking minute (and sometimes I woke up in the
middle of the night thinking about it too). The realisation that we
would not face a nice orderly transition to some other kind of fuel
that would allow us to keep everyday life looking more or less like
it does at the moment had hit me in the gut like a three hundred
pound gorilla charging at me. The implications!

Up until then, my
general reaction to the term peak oil was: so what? As anyone raised
on a diet of environmental liberalism I despised oil for polluting
the seas and heating the climate. Wars were fought over oil, river
deltas poisoned and real-life J.R.Ewings existed just because of this
sticky black goo. The sooner it was all gone then the sooner we could
all drive electric cars powered by wind turbines!

But I had been missing
the point all along.

I realised that I had
become a peak oil Cassandra. Up until then I had always assumed I was
an environmentalist. I felt I had been an environmentalist from the
age of about six when I gazed at a shiny new plastic bucket in our
garden and worried to myself that it seemed so … unnatural. From
that point onwards I followed the familiar arc of learning and,
attending a meeting with Jonathan Porritt when I was 18 made up my
mind that, whatever I did in life, it had to involve saving the world
somehow.

I failed miserably on
that last bit, and despite doing all the greenie things such as
recycling, experimenting with vegetarianism, working as a rainforest
volunteer etc, etc, the gap between what I believed in and what I
should actually be doing continued to widen. The great consumer
culture boom that began in the 1980s was like a tsunami that carried
everyone along on it and it was only possible to profess
environmental views in polite society if it were done in the context
of middle class green consumerist tokenism. Cognitive dissonance led
to gnawing guilt and in the year 2000 I quit my well paid job as an
energy trader – a job which I just seemed to have floated into like
a stick being swept along on a river - and set off around the world
for almost two years with my wife, living out of a backpack. Along
the way I spent quite some time in Laos, and saw first hand how a
nation could be stripped of its natural resources in the name of
development.

When we came back we
started a family and moved to Spain where I set up an environmental
newspaper and renovated an old farmhouse with a view to becoming an
organic farmer. This was all well and good and I appeared to be
finally walking my green talk, but what I still did not appreciate
was the fact that my whole way of life and the system we lived under
was still vastly subsidised by fossil fuels. I laboured under the
idea (propagated in my newspaper) that at some point people would
'wake up' and become environmentally conscious. I guess you could
call it naïvety.

How do you explain to
someone who considers themselves non-religious that the modern
religion they have been indoctrinated with is scientific materialism
wrapped up in the idea of progress? It is a bit like trying to
explain the concept of wetness to a fish. I considered whether I was
religious or not. Having been brought up to all intents and purposes
an atheist, how could I possibly consider anything else?

But peak oil had taught
me a lot about the way the world works. To plunge into the peak oil
universe is to begin to grapple with everything from thermodynamics,
macro economics and human ecology to mythology, sacred geometry and
the true meaning of religion. I looked at the word religion again –
it comes from the Latin and means 'a reattachment' to the universe
that we are a part of. Anyone who seriously considers themselves as a
separate entity from the universe should go on a long walk somewhere
remote and have a good think.

I began to think in
terms of energy and matter. We all live on a globe floating in space
around a sun. All of our energy comes in the form of relatively weak
and diffuse rays from that sun and the fact that we are gobbling our
way through fossilised sunlight in the form of oil with no regard for
the next generation or the life support systems of the planet that we
have evolved to live on – the only planet we will ever live on -
is a cause for some concern (to put it mildly). Since our
grandfathers' grandfathers were babies we have used this windfall of
energy recklessly to convert materials formed by nature into
materials that only have value to mankind. Everything we have
produced, from cars and factories to hand crafted violins and
beautiful works of art is a form of pollution from the Earth's point
of view. Every time they tell us on the news that the economy has
grown a bit, that effectively means that the natural world has shrunk
a bit.

But point this out to
people and you will usually be met with a blank look, or worse. To
suggest that the vast store of fossilised sunlight we have been
gorging ourselves on for generations is coming to an end and that our
societies, economies and psyches are utterly unprepared for it is to
invite being called a doomer. Another thing one quickly learns via
peak oil is that when confronted with perceived bad news we quickly
revert to our base social primate 'see no evil …' selves.

If you want to find out
for yourself try telling a few people the following points and
check their reaction:

In the future we
won't have most of the medicines we rely on today

In the future we
won't build bases on the Moon or Mars

In the future
there will be no new energy sources that rival petroleum in their
ability to power a vast industrial economy

In the future
there will be no point in having a pension

In the future very
few people will travel to foreign countries

In most instances the
people who don't laugh and tell you to get a life will suggest instead
that you should read up a bit on 'what's really going on'. A vast solar
array covering the Sahara/Nevada Desert will power all of
Europe/North America. New Thorium powered nuclear reactors will come
online shortly and give us all the electricity we desire at virtually
no cost. We'll grow algae in the sea and use it to make biodiesel. A
big mirror in space will beam down energy straight to our smart
grids.

In any case, there's no need to worry because the Arabs have masses of oil but they are hoarding it for
themselves. The planet is actually full of oil but the evil corporate
controlled media is keeping it a secret from us.

Those clever guys in
the labs will think of something!

Quite often people won't be quite so polite when you suggest that humankind is subject to the same kind of limitations as other species and to say so is to invite foaming mouthed rhetoric spewed out angrily.

If you know people who
say these things what they are doing is projecting their belief
system onto you. They don't need any evidence that we are destiny's
darlings (to borrow a phrase) or that the entire planet seems to have
been formed just so that we could evolve into our present form and
spend our time playing Angry Birds on our iPhones. They don't need
any evidence because this is what most people choose to believe –
and if enough people all believe something all together doesn't that
make it come true?

Alas, no. We have but
one planet and we are but one species amongst millions on its
surface. Individually we are microscopic and insignificant. We have a
great capacity for destruction, but also a great capacity for
creativity. We have never really got over our monkey mindedness,
which is a shame because that would have been quite useful in our
current situation. “What's a smart species like us doing in a
predicament like this?” asked the Italian peak oil writer Ugo Bardi
a few weeks ago.

Quite.

Still, if all of the
above sounds like bad news, then there is good news as well. Like all
people in a state of denial (and I am including British environmentalists George Monbiot and Mark Lynas
here), it can be tough to face up to reality. But once you have done
so things become easier. To study and become viscerally aware of the
implications of our looming energy descent naturally leads to
questioning about what we can do about it. This is the good part,
because it involves empowering yourself. Growing your own food,
building stronger relationships, quitting the soul destroying cubicle
job, insulating your home and stepping off the debt treadmill are
just some of the overwhelmingly positive things we can all do. You
can get involved with your local Transition movement and get a hold
of Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook. You can brew your own beer, make
your own soap, write your own songs and decide never to watch the X
Factor again.

These are some of the
things that I focus on on a daily basis. An awareness of peak oil - lets call ourselves peaksters - provides us with insights into the nature of our predicament – it's
going to be a rough ride down the far side of Hubbert's peak, but we
can either rise to the challenge as individuals, families and groups,
or we can keep our heads in the sand and allow ourselves to be
buffeted around by the forces of chaos as the entire system we have
built our lives into begins to come apart at the seams.

2 comments:

Hi Jason, a very clear, and may I say well-written article. I am also a huge fan of JMG to the extent of actually joining AODA and doing the daily prayer and meditation, solar observances, study and so on. I presume JMG's natural brilliance has been amplified by Druidry practice, so hey, it couldn't hurt and might do me some good.It is indeed an uphill struggle to move the awareness of peak oil and climate change into the mainstream consciousness; it often seems as if humanity is in massive denial. Best wishes for you various projects of disengagement, the little spot you have in Spain seems pretty sweet.Robert

Hi Robert - thanks! Yes, I am truly grateful to JMG for passing on some his vast store of knowledge and wisdom to us. When I first read his books it was a bit like discovering that there was actually a very sane (and very cogent) person among us who was willing to hold up his hand and say 'enough!'

As far as Druidry goes, my guess is that we will see a lot more people following its path in the near future as the current religion of scientific materialism falls apart at the seams. Let's face it, the other religions we have aren't all that useful in the light of the problems we face. A belief system that puts the web of life at its centre - rather than us - makes perfect sense to me.

And in terms of the uphill struggle, I often ponder whether it is even worth trying to convince people who clearly don't want to be convinced. Wouldn't we just be better spending our precious time and energy preparing ourselves for the bumpy descent? I guess that's a question without an answer.Cheers, Jason